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Before interest in Carl Stalling's music surged in the late 1980s, most of the critical writing on music and cartoons focused on Scott Bradley. During his almost twenty-five years of composing cartoons for MGM (1934–1957), Bradley not only made a name for himself as a composer but also developed a unique composing style that became highly influential in his own time and afterward. Though the stories of the MGM cartoons are often quite generic, they have a unique signature: violent action sequences combined with Bradley's illustrative approach to musical scoring. The penchant for extreme cartoon violence appears to have originated at the MGM studio during a time that America was involved in an unprecedented global conflict. Bradley took great pride in composing music for animated films, expressing high hopes for the future of cartoon music and of animation in general, and, as the sole composer for one of the major Hollywood animation studios, believed he could bring about change in his small corner of the industry.

Carl Stalling's work as a composer for Hollywood cartoons was apparently headed for the same fate as practically all film music: heard but never widely recognized for its creativity and originality. That changed two decades after his death in 1972, when Greg Ford and Hal Willner produced The Carl Stalling Project (1990–95), two CDs of Stalling's music taken from his time at Warner Bros. (1936–1958). The discs sold surprisingly well for a niche release; the first of the two discs actually appeared briefly on the Billboard album chart. As a result, a new interest in cartoon music began to emerge in the early 1990s. Through the CDs, Stalling suddenly became visible to animation fans who had never before thought about him or his work for the cartoons. This chapter examines how the two sides of Stalling's personality as a composer—the humorous side and the practical side—came together in each score through his use of precomposed or popular music. It also looks at how, during his twenty-plus years at Warner Bros., Stalling's approach to musical scoring naturally evolved.

Opera has always been an easy target for Hollywood cartoons. Its combination of music and drama, set in distant or even mythical places and featuring characters who often dressed in outlandish costumes as they sang in other languages (frequently about ultra-romantic situations), presented fertile material for satire. Dozens of possible cartoons might be considered, but the best-known example is What's Opera, Doc? (Warner Bros., 1957), Chuck Jones's interpretation of Richard Wagner's operatic universe. Part of the unique standing that What's Opera, Doc? holds in the animation world is due to its being one of the few complete operatic parodies, beginning and ending in the narrative space of an operatic drama. This chapter presents a detailed analysis of What's Opera, Doc?, including its storytelling and its take on classical music, and discusses the persistent use of Wagner's music in film and cartoon scores. It also considers the animated influences on Jones's story, Wagner's presence in film and cartoon music, and the production of cartoons during World War II.

With the demise of the animation units run by or for major Hollywood companies, the power shifted to independent animation studios that could supply the seemingly insatiable demand for children's television programming. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, DIC, Ruby-Spears, and other film studios paid little attention to (or money for) such luxuries as unique sound effects or original music. At the same time, there was an explosion of cartoons featuring rock bands, including Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, Josie and the Pussycats, and Jabberjaw. A renaissance in cartoon production occurred in the late 1980s. Reawakened interest in the now-classic Warner Bros. cartoons led Steven Spielberg to produce Tiny Toon Adventures, based on Warner stars and cartoons. At the same time, networks and cable channels commissioned entirely novel series, including Rugrats, Animaniacs, Batman, and Doug. Moreover, contemporary popular music has become a fundamental element in contemporary cartoons. And, of course, we cannot overlook the road map for cartoon music drawn by Carl Stalling and Scott Bradley some seventy-five years ago.

Cartoons are typically lumped together as a self-contained genre because they happen to have been created through the same process: animation. The medium of animation requires that music for cartoons be conceived and constructed differently than traditional feature film music. We can best see these differences by examining two issues: who helped to establish the paradigmatic sound of Hollywood cartoons, and how music was used to enhance and intensify cartoons as a whole. This book presents a set of case studies rather than an all-encompassing history of cartoon music, focusing on two broad ideas: genre and compositional style. It discusses the methods of Carl Stalling and Scott Bradley, who it considers to be the two most influential composers of music for theatrical cartoons, at the one studio where each had the most historical significance. For Bradley, that studio is necessarily MGM; for Stalling, a choice is possible. The book concentrates on Warner Bros., where Stalling came into his own as a composer and employed popular music in his scores.